Thursday, January 9, 2014

The Romantic Era (pt. 18)

Turner became an oil landscape
painter after practicing first as a watercolor painter. We can see the influence it had on his oil
paintings, which largely appear, well, watercolory (for lack of a better
term). He did not pay attention to
nature in realistic detail—as in, focusing on all of the minutiae to create a
more photorealistic-looking image—but rather focused on the effects that light
and atmosphere have on the subject matter.
He used blurred forms and intense colors to create the effect of a
scene, rather than the scene itself. (In
other words, according to his philosophy, a night scene would be painted almost
completely black, even though that doesn't make for a very exciting painting to
look at, because it is how one would see it in real life). Understanding this, we can see why Turner
would approach, say, a snowstorm in such a stylistic manner.

This is Turner's painting of a
Steamboat off a Harbor's Mouth during a snowstorm. In the style of the Dark Romantics tackling
the darker side of Romantic life, this painting is Turner's view of nature at
its most violent. His brushstrokes are harsh
and disarrayed to demonstrate the wildness of nature. There is not much color, and yet have you
ever seen a more dramatic painting? The
fierceness of Tuner's subject seems to scream out at us—but no doubt in muffled
cries overwhelmed by the almighty gusts of this tempestuous wind here pictured. In fact, we hardly do see a subject at all; I
can't discern too much of the steamboat in the painting, can you? We can kind of see the flagpole and the flag
in the center there, but not much else.
All we see is wind, icy and hostile, overpowering…something: it's too
distorted by the awesome power of the storm to tell exactly what. Nature in this painting is anything but tame
and tranquil; this is nature at its most precarious, threatening, and utterly
inhospitable. Therefore different
ideologically from its Romantic counterparts, the painting nevertheless falls
into the same Romantic category of classification for reasons of historicity
and subject matter continuity. Even so,
we can see how this is unlike any other Romantic work of art that we have
looked at. The style in which it was
painted, too, proves wholly unique upon inspection.

At first wholly unintelligible,
this work presents a dizzying image of the effect a snowstorm would have on an
environment and one's vision of it.
Instead of detail, the artist has used bold, sweeping color and
light. Even though we can see the
flagpole of the steamboat in the center, this work does not look very real,
does it? That is because Turner was
painting abstract things like speed, wind, and atmosphere instead of tangible
things like rocks, trees, and animals.
In this way, these kinds of paintings by J. M. W. Turner were remarkably
ahead of their time, before Impressionism and Abstract Art would adopt the same
approach to art—to create a feeling of an environment, instead of a literal,
snapshot image; and to try to paint abstract concepts onto the canvas alongside
the real objects. This is a critical
shift in art. Just look at the splashing
paint on this canvas. If I hadn't told
you it was a snowstorm, would you have known what this was an image of?

Although I connected some of
Turner's subject matter here with the literary movement of the Dark Romantics
merely by marking similarities on their treatment of nature as a darker entity
than typical Romantic artists would have, there is still little explicit
material to inextricably link J. M. W. Turner with the Dark Romantic
movement. He lived his whole life as a
student of Romanticism, and even today his artwork still continues to be read
as Romantic in style. He died on
December 19, 1851, and is noted to have said, as his final words, "The sun
is God."